A Contrastive Study of Lexical Cohesion in English Short Story Books Written by Native English and Iranian Authors

Abstract

The present study aimed at probing into the use of lexical cohesion sub-devices in English short story books written by native English and Iranian authors. To this end, the researcher selected two short stories, i.e. Joseph Conrad and Simin Daneshvar as the native and Iranian corpus of the study respectively. Then, he used Halliday and Hassan’s (1976) taxonomy of lexical cohesion for analyzing the samples of lexical cohesion was used. After collecting the data from the two sets of corpora, the researcher estimated the frequency and density of lexical cohesion ties. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference in the use of lexical ties in two corpora. In addition, the results revealed that in native English short story book the density of lexical ties was more than in the Iranian short story book. The findings have several implications for language instructors, university students and Iranian authors.